


a stardust story

by ninemoons42



Series: the chronicles of Force ghost Lyra Erso [2]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Feels, Challenge Response, Clinging, Dreams and Nightmares, F/M, Inspired By Tumblr, Introspection, Literal Sleeping Together, Prompt Fic, Prompt Fill, Rogue One - some of them live
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-28
Updated: 2017-02-28
Packaged: 2018-09-27 12:30:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10020878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Cassian finally found the chance and the need to tell Jyn the story of how he climbed back to life and to her.(Hint: There is a Force ghost involved.)





	

It wasn’t like waking up in a bed that was still shaking from the way he thrashed in his nightmares was anything new -- because he’d long since lost count of the many, many different kinds of terrible specters that chose to haunt him through the too-short too-fraught too-scant hours of his restless sleep. The eyes of the dead and the eyes of those who didn’t want to stay alive. The prisoners and the maimed and the ones who would never truly be in their right minds again. 

He was, unfortunately, all too inured to the bad dreams, and normally he would just get up and drink something -- whatever was at hand -- and then try to go back to sleep.

But this time, the bed was shaking and he wasn’t alone in the bed, and he blessedly couldn’t recall if he’d been dreaming or what he’d been dreaming about, and so -- the bed was shaking because someone else was lost in her terrible dreams.

He didn’t want to ask -- but he did want to know. He couldn’t bear to ask Jyn to relive her nightmares in retelling them. He didn’t know if it would help her to talk about her bad dreams.

So he did only what he could do: and at that moment, he could only pin down Jyn’s ankles with his own feet. He could wrap his arms very firmly and very gently around her shaking shoulders. He could say, sleep-rough, “Jyn. Wake up. You are dreaming. Wake up. I am here. Wake up. It’s me. It’s Cassian. You are safe -- ”

She went deathly, deathly still in his arms.

He closed his eyes. Ignored that he might be trying not to cry. He hated seeing the look on her face when she woke up in this perturbed way, wild and haunted and bleak -- and he faced it anyway, looking up, looking at her, head-on.

She didn’t recognize him for a long moment. He knew that by the fear that knotted her eyebrows together.

And then she said, “Cassian,” and he didn’t sag. Just gathered her close. Let her cling to him.

“I thought I was over that,” she said. “We were on Jedha, on the surface, the first time. Scarif, though -- ”

He knew. They had watched the Death Star fire on Scarif. True that they had been speeding desperately away, hoping for some sort of safety in hyperspace. But they had all seen it, all of them who had been in that last shuttle in its panicked flight: and even Chirrut had mentioned wanting to meditate away the echoes of that shot. He knew: that obliterating flash of light and death. Scarif blasted partway into stardust and shattered lives. Lost data.

No words to soothe Jyn through that. He scattered kisses into her sweat-matted hair instead. 

“Sorry,” she mumbled, after a while.

“I never told you how I got back up to you,” he heard himself say, completely without thinking about it.

“You didn’t want to talk about it.” He felt her nuzzle into his throat. She was seeking his comfort, and in doing so she was giving him the same thing.

“Because it was too strange.”

“What in our lives isn’t?”

He thought about it.

Nodded, though she couldn’t see it. Assenting. “Your mother,” he said. “She was there. An image all in blue. You have her eyes, I think.”

He felt her exhale shakily into his skin. “My mother.”

“Yes, your mother. I know she’s dead, Jyn. I know that. But I saw her, in the data facility. She gave me the strength I needed to get back to my feet and climb. I think -- I think I owe her my life.”

“So all of you did see her.”

He blinked, and looked down, and Jyn’s smile wobbled on the edge of tears. A kind of sweet grief in the trails on her cheeks. “Baze told me. He said he had to tell me, because he hadn’t been a believer, and yet.”

“Your mother saved us,” Cassian said.

“And all of you saved me. So -- she saved me, too,” Jyn said. “Saved me again and again. That last day, I never wanted her to leave me, and then I knew why she pushed me away.” Quiet sobs. “I can’t see her.”

“She said it was your necklace. She didn’t want to be affected by it.”

“I don’t want to lose her.”

He brushed away her tears. Tasted his own, in the corners of his mouth. “I -- if I see her again, what do I tell her from you?”

Jyn shook her head. “She knows.” A pause, and then: “Papa called me Stardust, but it was Mama who made a song out of it, for me.”

“A song,” Cassian heard himself echo.

“A song.” And she was humming, softly, sending the notes into his skin and bones, warming him -- and he pulled her closer, to share that warmth and the sweet painful sadness in her song.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Week Two: "stardust" at [@rebelcaptainprompts](http://rebelcaptainprompts.tumblr.com/) over on Tumblr.
> 
> I am also on tumblr myself -- look me up [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


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